


Snapshots

by osprey_archer



Series: Bolsheviks [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Picnics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 16:46:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7722238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier has a picnic with his Soviet team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snapshots

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to littlerhymes for betaing this!

“Tomatoes!” the Soldier cries. 

“Compliments of Mikoyan,” says Grisha. “They’re from his dacha.”

Grisha has come to visit them in the Ukraine. It’s not a social visit – the Soldier knows Grisha is here for a field report on the Soldier’s abilities – but he’s brought along a vast picnic basket, so of course the Soldier is unpacking it. 

He found the tomatoes on top, just beneath a folded tablecloth that he shakes out on the ground. Petya, always the neat freak, attempts to straighten it as the Soldier unpacks the rest of the basket.

Tomatoes. A clutch of hard-boiled eggs wrapped up in _Pravda_ newspapers. Two fat loaves of good rye bread, no peas to stretch the flour, and golden wheels of cheese. Down at the bottom, a sausage the size of Agnessa’s arm, and three bottles of Sovietskoye Champagne. 

The Soldier lays it all reverently on the cloth. Everyone else has stopped talking; they’re watching, almost holding their breath. It has been ages since they’ve seen a feast like this. 

Agnessa breaks the silence. “Well, that’ll be about enough for you, Soldat,” she jokes. “You bring anything for the rest of us, Comrade Zefirov?”

They laugh, all but Petya, whose set hard face rarely breaks into even a smile. He takes one of the bottles of champagne and gestures at the Soldier with the bottle neck. “He eats like an army, that one,” he tells Grisha.

“And I fight like a whole army, too,” the Soldier counters easily.

“Any cigarettes in there, Soldat?” Marusya asks. Her voice is gruff and raspy from nearly forty years of cigarettes. The Soldier once saw her smoke straw when they ran out of even the cheap makhorka tobacco. 

Grisha removes a pack from his pocket and passes it around the circle. Marusya takes one for now and sticks another for later behind her ear; Petya takes one almost grudgingly, most of his attention on getting the top off the champagne. Agnessa takes one and holds it up toward the Soldier. “Soldat?” she asks. 

The Soldier snaps his fingers so the lighter in his thumb catches fire. He’s practiced a lot to get the motion just right. Agnessa tucks her cigarette between her lips and leans forward to light it from his fingertip. The cigarette catches, ember-bright, and Agnessa leans back, taking it between her fingers and blowing out a slow line of smoke. 

“Soldat,” Marusya says, impatient. He lights her cigarette as well, and his own, and holds out his finger toward Grisha as well. 

He is pleased to see that Grisha is gaping. “Soldat, did you build that yourself?” 

“Comrade Kirilenko and I made it,” says the Soldier, gesturing at Agnessa, and adds modestly, “It was her idea.” 

“I have to get a photo,” Grisha murmurs. “Yegor Kirilovitch…”

“A photo!” Agnessa says. She had been resting against a tree stump, slouched in an approximation of cool elegance, but now her round face lights up and she is checking the picnic basket. “Do you have a camera?” she asks, but before she’s even finished the sentence she’s found it and is holding it up and peering through the viewfinder. “Can I take the photos?”

“Oh, all right,” Grisha says indulgently, which is good, because she’s already snapped a photo of the Soldier. He flings an arm around Grisha’s shoulder, and she snaps another of the two of them together, the Soldier beaming at the camera and Grisha staring at him in surprise. “Well, get the lighter at least,” he says, so Agnessa photographs that too. 

“Comrade Beck, will you blow us a smoke ring?” she asks, and Marusya obliges, and laughs when the Soldier scoots in and kisses her wrinkled cheek for a photograph.

“Cheeky boy!” she says, and swats him. 

Agnessa takes a photo of Petya too, although he doesn’t even raise his scowl to the camera. “Now Roman – ” she says, and stops, because Roman is nowhere to be seen. 

That brings Petya’s head up. “Where’s Roman?” he demands.

Marusya flicks ash off her cigarette. “Wandered off. Like he does.”

There’s nothing to worry about; this area is safe now, that’s why they’re lounging around having a picnic outside. But Petya’s face is turning purple. “That fucker’s going to get himself killed!” he explodes. 

“Oh, pipe down, Petka,” Marusya says. “We’re all going to die someday. No use trying to avoid it.” 

“It’s safe here; the area’s been pacified – ” Grisha begins. 

But Petya is too worked up to listen. “So let’s just let him go step on a landmine?” he yells at Marusya. 

Marusya shrugs. “If it’s got his name on it, that’s how he’ll go.” 

Grisha sighs infinitesimally. “Soldat, go find Roman,” he says. “You and Comrade Kirilenko.” 

Grisha is getting the Soldier out of the way so he can talk to Petya. The Soldier isn’t worried about it; even Petya will have to admit the Soldier’s done well. 

And he is happy to be walking with Agnessa, in the sunshine, in woods where they needn’t creep like rabbits, because there is no chance of snipers in the trees. They walk quietly anyway, slipping their feet along the ground so they don’t break the twigs. Habits are hard to break. 

The Soldier feels a thrill of daring when he says, his voice only a little louder than a whisper, “Where do you think he’s got to?”

“Probably not too far,” Agnessa breathes back, and clears her throat and covers her mouth at the seemingly loudness of it. They look at each other and begin to laugh at their own quietness. Even their laughs are almost silent. 

Agnessa straightens to parade rest. She clears her throat again, and can’t help one last check for gunners in the trees, and says – too loud, now – “I think he’s writing a poem. He had that look on the train this morning.”

The Soldier is pleased. “I should have told Grisha to bring him more paper,” he says. Roman writes all his poems in a battered copy of Chernyshevsky’s _What Is To Be Done?_ , half the pages of which Marusya has torn out to roll cigarettes. The only other book they have is Stalin’s _Short Course_ and of course Roman couldn’t write in _that_. 

They find the battered wreck of a Nazi tank not too far away. Years of fallen leaves have settled on its flat places, forming a loam, and the tank is sprouting ferns and saplings. “Baba Yaga’s new house,” Agnessa suggests, and _snap_ goes the camera shutter. 

“Even Baba Yaga has to modernize,” the Soldier agrees. “Like a good Soviet citizen.” 

“Chicken legs are outdated, comrades. By the end of the next five-year plan all witches will move their houses with tanks.” 

The tank doesn’t look like a thing of the future. It looks like an ancient ruin, all overgrown in wavering green leaves. It is just the kind of thing Roman would like, and sure enough, when the Soldier and Agnessa walk around it, they find Roman curled up in the curve of one of the sagging tank treads. The wheels have long since disappeared: probably scavenged by villagers. 

He flicks his eyes up at them, turning the stub of a pencil between his fingers. He is missing two from frostbite. “Go away,” he says. “I’m writing.” 

The Soldier and Agnessa go on, walking around the tank to look at it from all angles. They reach the front again – the tank’s long gun has long since broken off – and the Soldier jumps on top. 

“The top’s crushed in,” he tells Agnessa. “I could open it.” He flexes his metal arm. “I bet no one’s been inside to loot.” 

“Only if there are dead Nazis in there, and all the gases of decay trapped inside – ”

The Soldier wrinkles his nose. “Spoil the picnic.”

Agnessa nods agreement. “Too bad, though,” she says. “I could get another watch.” And she lifts her arm, pulling up her sleeve so her three German wristwatches glint in the sunlight. None of them are wound, of course, but they all work. Agnessa is a whiz with machines; often she and the Soldier have worked side by side on an engine, tinkering a few more miles out of a battered American lend-lease Jeep. 

“Well,” says the Soldier. He leans against the broken stub of the tank gun. “We could come back after we eat. Bring gas masks.”

But Agnessa isn’t listening. She’s lifted the camera to her eye, and raises a hand like a soldier forcing a halt. “Hold it, hold it,” she says, and the Soldier holds his pose next to the gun as she snaps the photo. 

She snaps more photos as he leans against the smashed turret to pose, and jumps up on top of it, and he would keep going – this is a lot of fun – but then he has a thought, and says, “We ought to get a picture of you.”

She laughs. But when he jumps off the tank and makes to take the camera from his hands, she turns away to keep it from him. 

“Of the two of us then,” the Soldier persists. “We’ll make Roman take it.”

Roman is not writing anymore. He sits with his book on his lap (the margins are nearly black with the ink of so many poems), gazing blankly at the pattern of sunlight filtering through the rusting tank treads. The Soldier kicks a clod of dirt at him. “Take our photograph, come on, Mayakovsky.”

Roman closes his book. “Don’t call me that.” 

“Oh? Mayakovsky not enough of a poet for you?” Agnessa asks.

“He wants to be Pushkin,” the Soldier adds, teasing. 

Roman jerks his shoulders as if to slough off their words. “Mayakovsky killed himself.” 

“All the best people kill themselves,” Agnessa says, in the bright light voice that the Soldier has come to know means something lies beneath it. But he can’t see past her smile. 

Roman is fitting his book back into a greatcoat pocket. “Oh? So when are you going to hang yourself?” he asks, acerbic. 

“Oh, I’m not a best person at all,” Agnessa says, more lightly still, and then grows very sober. “There aren’t any left now. The war killed them all. ” 

The Soldier doesn’t like this conversation at all. It is far too dark for a sunny picnic day. “You’re both good, and not best at all, so you can live forever,” he says. “Roman, take the picture, why don’t you?” 

“My good side, my good side,” Agnessa says, turning her face so only her unscarred cheek faces the camera. 

“They’re both good sides,” the Soldier protests. 

“Oh hush. Don’t listen to him, Roman.” 

“Hold still,” Roman says, intent on the viewfinder, and they both fall quiet. They are quite close together, facing each other, and he is looking into her gray eyes. She has cut the hair on her head quite short, but her lashes are long and dark and give a softness to her face, and he is so intent on her that he doesn’t hear the camera click until Roman scoffs, “Lovebirds.”

Then Agnessa moves swiftly away. “Now come on,” she says. “We have to go back or Petya will eat all the sausage.”

Roman hoots with laughter, and the Soldier joins him, and they laugh even harder because Agnessa’s deadpan doesn’t crack. It is impossible to imagine Petya eating all the sausage. Usually he picks at his food and tosses it to the half-starved dog that has taken to hanging around their camp. 

Even Agnessa can’t help smiling in the end. She reins it in and says severely, “He _will_ drink all the champagne.” 

“Champagne!” says Roman. He slides out of his place in the tank. “Well then. Let’s go.” 

They walk back through the woods. The sunlight filters through the leaves, casting a shifting net of light across Agnessa’s face, and she turns and smiles up at the Soldier. He reaches out and takes her hand, and they walk hand in hand. The ground beneath their feet is soft with years of fallen leaves. 

Marusya’s gravelly voice travels through the trees as they approach the clearing. She is singing “Katyusha,” except she replaces _Katyusha_ with _Petyusha_. Grisha’s laugh booms out. Petya is probably scowling. 

They reach the edge of the trees. Agnessa’s hand slips from his grasp. 

Petya has propped himself against a tree, an empty bottle of champagne in his lap. Marusya has sliced the bread and cheese and sausage and now sits flipping her knife, complicated twists of her hands and wrists that the Soldier longs to copy. “Ah, so you’re back!” she says, and tosses the knife in the dirt. “We can eat.” 

And it’s good, all of it. They toast Comrade Stalin with the champagne and then dig in to the rich salty sausage, the heavy dark rye. They all take eggs and tap them together to break the shells, as if it were New Year’s. The tomatoes have grown warm in the sun, and the Soldier bites into one like an apple, and has to tilt his head back to keep the juices from dripping off his chin onto his greatcoat. 

He collapses back on the grass when the meal is over. It is dry with the summer heat and smells sweet, like hay. Agnessa lies down beside him. “Did you ever look for pictures in the clouds as a child?” she asks, dreamy, and it is a moment before she sits up in chagrin, and says, “Oh – ”

She has remembered the amnesia. The Soldier waves a hand at her. “I think I did,” he tells her. He puts his flesh hand behind his head, and tilts his face toward the sun. “I’m almost sure I did.”


End file.
